


Dysautonomia

by Pip_n_Flinx



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/F, Gen, Major Character Injury, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:48:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27146860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pip_n_Flinx/pseuds/Pip_n_Flinx
Summary: Mira Ryder winds up on the wrong end of a charging eiroch. While the pathfinder team manages to take down the wild beast, the noise has attracted the attention of Kadara's seedy scavenger population. A crippled Initiative team seems like easy pickings to the freelancers, and Vetra Nyx must find a way to save her injured partner.
Relationships: Vetra Nyx/Female Ryder | Sara
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	Dysautonomia

**Author's Note:**

> A big thanks to Natsora for requesting this via prompt.

“It is not always so easy to keep such promises.”

“Ryder, I’ve seen you come back from the dead once.”

“I can’t say I recommend the experience.”

“Just promise me you’ll do it again this time.”

“The Pathfinders vitals are failing, Vetra. While I have some power over her physiology, I cannot speed the clotting of blood. It relies on reactions which…”

“SAM! Enough.”

The Pathfinder was coughing up blood. Human anatomy had never been a focus for Vetra, and she suddenly regretted not studying up. The Eiroch’s charge had pinned Mira against an outcrop of rock. Even over the roar of the beast and the whine of her Hurricane, Vetra had heard a sickening crunch. It was terrible timing for Kadara’s scavengers to find the Pathfinder Team, but lady luck had no mercy today.

“Ryder! Ryder, damnit! You promised you would never walk out on me! Don’t you walk out on me now!”

“I’m not walking anywhere Vet.”

“SAM, the pathfinder is getting delirious.”

“Am not…”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“The Pathfinder has several broken ribs, as well as a punctured lung and bruising of the liver. If evacuated to a secure medical facility, I estimate her chances of survival at…”

“Never tell me the odds SAM. Cora, cover us! I’m going to carry her out of here”

“What? No! What if you puncture her other lung? You can’t risk moving her in that condition!”

“You got a better plan?”

Mira felt light tipped over Vetra’s shoulder, legs dangling on either side. She’d never been so grateful for Cora’s facility with barriers as she was on this sprint to the Nomad. The Pathfinder moaned weakly twice, then fell silent.

“Kallo? Kallo! Kallo, I need you here yesterday! Do you copy Kallo?!”

“Vetra, what's happened? Gil is firing up the drive core now, we’ll be airborne momentarily”

“Not fast enough, Kallo! I said yesterday!”

“Shouting at Kallo won’t help Vetra”

“Cora! Just drive, damnit!”

“Kallo, the Pathfinder is unconscious and suffering from medical trauma due to an Eiroch attack. There are hostiles in pursuit of the Nomad. I advise Lexi be standing ready in the loading bay with the Drack and Liam fully suited up. Time is of the essence.”

“Thanks SAM…”

“Acknowledged, pathfinder team. The Tempest is underway.”

“Ooh! I’ll inform Drack and Liam.”

“Copilot leaving the bridge. Thanks Suvi”

The Nomad lurched, Vetra’s ears rang, and Mira nearly slid off the reclined seat she was resting in. Cora cursed up front, swinging the vehicle into as tight a turn as she could manage at this speed.

“Kallo, we have to adjust heading! I’m taking us through a canyon for more cover, can you meet us on the next ridge?”

“Copy that Cora, I’ll get us there.”

“Thanks Kallo, and about earlier….”

“It’s fine Vetra. Kallo out.”

Twenty-three agonizing seconds passed, with nothing for her to do but watch the chronometer in her visor HUD. The Nomad popped out of the ravine, briefly losing contact with the ground. When the spinning tires touched down again, Vetra glanced out the windshield to see an empty skyline. Her heart sank.

“Kallo, where are…”

“Almo-ost there!”

The Tempest came hurtling overhead as Kallo yanked the ship into a tight hairpin turn, its wake nearly rolling the Nomad over. As Cora turned with the gust and slammed on the break, SAM began routing Liam and Drack into their earpieces.

“Doc is standing by. Drack and I will provide covering fire and advance to draw them off. Cora, Vetra, your first priority is to get the Pathfinder to the medbay. Pee-bee and Jaal will secure the cargo bay.

“Heh-eh-eh. Hope those scum are ready for a Krogan!”

“Tempest touching down, opening the bay now pathfinder team.”

Vetra hefted the Pathfinder in her arms and made for exit. Cora encased the three in a biotic bubble, and they closed on the open bay door. Not encumbered by a fallen teammate, Liam and Drack sprinted past. Liam was even using his jump jets for a burst of speed as he leapt into the first mercenary he found.

“Drack, on your 9!”

“I see em kid”

Returning her focus to the ramp ahead of her, Vetra stormed up to bay where Lexi was waiting anxiously with a stretcher. Laying Mira down as gently as possible, she turned to the Doctor.

“Make sure she makes it, Doc.”

“I’ll do my best. SAM?”

“The Pathfinder is unconscious. Suffering internal bleeding and pneumothorax, several broken ribs, as well as bruising of the liver. Oxygen deprivation is the primary concern now, as she stopped breathing about 12 seconds ago. Stimulating her diaphragm now.”

Vetra turned, hoping against hope the doctor and the AI could save Mira’s life. Amped up, nerves and her run to the Tempest, she knew she couldn’t just sit still and wait outside the medbay. Nodding to Cora she unlimbered her Hurricane and stalked back to the open ramp, past Jaal and Peebee, who were taking potshots at anyone who got too close.

Spinning up the rifle, she moved her left hand over to her omni tool to punch up her power armor. Only two scavengers remained on the field, and one was desperately diving away from Liam’s grenade. Bringing the stock up to her shoulder, 7 bullets already discharged into the ground, She took sight on the mercenary diving for cover. In seconds he was riddled in bullet holes, and she swung around to where she remembered the last scavenger to be.

As she rounded, Hurricane still flaring, her sight crossed Drack. He was pinning the scavenger down with his flamethrower as a couple of rounds sunk into his shield from behind.

“Drack! Duck!”

“A little warning next time, kid!”

As Drack dove out of the way, Vetra trained her sight on their final foe. Her clip was almost spent, and several of her rounds flew past, barely grazing him. It barely took a moment to slam a concussive round into the extra chamber she’d installed on her gun, and it was away a moment later. It slammed into his chest with a satisfying report, knocking him back a meter and flat on his ass. In the time it took her to reload Drack had closed the distance, firing his Ruzad into the scavenger’s belly.

“We had that, Vetra.”

“You were taking too long.”

“You trying to get your fringe cracked kid?”

“Just trying to kill him.”

“I’ve put turian’s in the hospital for less”

“Easy now, Drack.”

“Hey, she’s still on her feet isn’t she? Ain’t crying for her mother yet.”

“Oh you’ll live, Drack. I’ll buy you a drink at Kralla’s song if you stop whining.”

“Whining? Not every day I get shot in the back by my team.”

“Drack has a point Vetra, you didn’t nee… “

“Doesn’t matter. They’re dead now. Let’s get moving.”

Drack eyed her, but some of the malice seemed to have spent itself at least. She could never be sure with Krogan, at least he’d eased off for now.

*************************************************

At the turn of the 21st century, conventional wisdom for treating broken ribs in humans was simply to let the internal pressure in the chest cavity push the fragments close enough that they would begin to mend with time. A punctured lung complicated this somewhat since neither of Ryder’s lungs were inflating properly, and the Pathfinder was reliant on mechanical assistance to keep oxygen in her blood. A pair of hollow needles should equalize pressure near the lungs, and allow the pathfinder to begin breathing ‘normally’ again. Lexi shuddered, knowing this was the first time she would have to perform his procedure without a human physician present.

_It’s only the human Pathfinder, and last beacon of hope for the Andromeda Initiative. No pressure Lexi, just the morale of one hundred thousand colonists riding on this surgery._

“Dr. T’perro, I advise haste. The Pathfinder’s condition is critical, as is their speedy recovery.”

“Got it SAM.”

Positioning a ferromagnetic scanner above Ryder, Lexi injected her with a mild tracker. As her cardiovascular-system pumped it through the Pathfinder, her screen lit up, illuminating the position of the organs. The bones were more difficult to spot as they mostly showed up as negative space, and showed most clearly above areas with high blood-flow, but it gave Lexi the confidence to make the first small incision. A long (sterilized) hollow needle was the next step, hooked up to a pressure monitor set to drain excess pressure from the chest cavity. As the pump whined to life, Lexi moved to the other side of her small operating theatre, to repeat the procedure on the other side when a thought struck her.

“SAM, how’s the internal bleeding looking? Is the Pathfinder clotting properly?”

“Clotting has begun to slow the blood loss, but there are injuries to the esophagus that require sutures. Additionally, the Pathfinder will require a blood transfusion.

Lexi lept to work on the sutures first. It took quite a bit of cleaning to find where the damage was, but after she was certain she had patched the Pathfinder back up she moved to get the transfusion set up. She’d had blood transfusions banked for the whole crew pre-departure, and fortunately since there was no one else in the med bay to mess with her organizational system it was easy to track down. Another needle puncture later, and Ryder was receiving the red blood cell boost she desperately needed to recover. Taking a moment to stabilize her own breathing, Lexi moved to the right side of the operating theatre.

It took a few minutes to carefully replicate her right-lung success, but Lexi found her hands surprisingly steady despite her nerves. _I guess Harry really was right. I am ready for this._ But now came the trickier part: reinforcing the ribs so Mira didn’t accidentally shift them out of place to slow her own recovery. Asari doctors had perfected a sort of gel-mesh that hardened only when exposed to a strong magnetic field. The trouble was human musculature was so pliant, for it to be effective here she would need to get it on the rib bones themselves. Lexi had elected to try and suspend the mesh under the sternum, but that meant a long incision and carefully gliding the gel along above the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. She would need three ferromagnetic scanners: one above, and one on either side. Additionally, she would employ tools tipped with cameras. The feed would run to a visor that would help her monitor up to 5 different visuals, including uplinks from the three body scans she had running.

After an agonizing 103 minutes, Lexi had the gel in place. There had been a few close calls, and at least one abrasion to Mira’s already battered lungs, but a metal brace had given her the room she needed to maneuver the gel into place. Some biodegradable tape to secure the mesh to the underside of Ryder’s ribs, and Lexi was almost set to realign the gel to turn it into a splint for the fractured bones. Now it was just down to getting the ribs back in the correct position before solidifying the gel.

“Alright SAM. It’s time to wake her up.”

*************************************************

Between the needles, tubes, oxygen mask, and whirring of the machines keeping her alive, Ryder looked buried to Vetra. She’d been pacing from the galley to the bunks and out past the medical lab, then back again, for over an hour now. Cora was guarding the Med Lab door, making sure Vetra didn’t try and sneak in.

The only reason they’d let her in now was to keep her from wearing a hole in the floor of the Tempest. Lexi was readying some syringe, and Cora and Liam were around to ensure she didn’t get in the doctor's way. As if she would! But as Lexi went to resuscitate Mira, and her eyes finally fluttered open, Vetra lurched forward. Cora had a hand on her before she could finish a single step.

“Alright Vetra, we’re headed out now.”

“But…”

“Cora’s right. C’mon, you owe Drack a drink at Kralla’s Song anyways.”

“Oh fine, you win Liam. Where is the old man?”

“I think he’s hanging around the engine room with Gil.”

“Alright, first rounds on me: for the daring rescue and the barriers! You coming, Cora?”

“Sure, I’ll take a free drink. I’ll let Peebee and Jaal know we’re leaving.”

*************************************************

Dropping the drinks on the table, Vetra flopped into a seat between Liam and Peebee. Word had reached Cora about her little friendly-fire incident earlier, and Vetra could swear the woman’s glare was going to bore a hole in her faceplates. It wasn’t like Drack was even hurt! She let out a long sigh before taking a long pull of dextro-brandy. She’d bought the first round; partly as thanks, partly as an apology. At the very least, drinking with the team and avoiding Cora’s withering stare distracted her from Mira’s injuries.

“So… What the hell happened out there?”

“Uh-uh, no. We are not doing this right now.”

Liam shook his head, and Vetra knew immediately he was going to force the issue. It was just like him: tenacious, curious, and entirely too blunt. They normally got along well enough, but Vetra was in no mood to relive the days events. She wanted to relax, not panic over the survival of the Pathfinder. Fortunately, Cora cut him off before he could continue:

“Pathfinder got caught between a rock and an eiroch. It wasn’t pretty. Scavengers must have heard the commotion. You know the rest as well as we do.”

“Between a rock and an eiroch? That sounds like one of Liam’s cheesy flix.”

“They aren’t cheesy! Gotta respect the classics.”

“Either you believe that or you get a sick sense of schadenfreude from lying about it. I’m not sure which I think is worse”

Vetra laughed along with Peebee’s joke, mostly on reflex. She tried to relax, but for the rest of the afternoon she just got more and more tense. After three hours, the crew decided to head back to the Tempest. It had felt like the longest three hours of her life, but Vetra couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened. Her vision seemed blurry too, as if her visor was out of focus. A quick check reassured her it wasn’t. She’d barely finished her second drink too, so it couldn’t be the booze. She filed it away for later, it certainly couldn’t be as important as Mira’s recovery, and scuttled back to the medbay to check on her partner.

*************************************************

Mira Ryder didn’t remember waking up to have her mesh set. She couldn’t recall the feel of the neodymium magnet Lexi had run over her chest. She certainly didn’t recall the procedures before she was resuscitated, nor did she recall falling back asleep after the doctor had offered her painkillers.

What Ryder did remember was waking up to a drowsy Vetra Nyx sprawled out beside her in the medbay. It helped calm the panic as she came to, wired up to more machines than she had fingers to count, strapped down to the operating table in the Tempest’s operating theatre. After more thrashing about that was prudent, given her injuries, she finally made enough ruckus to stir Vetra.

*************************************************

“Hey, Ryder. Really gave me a scare back there.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation I feel like shit.”

“Ha! Me too. Do you need anything? I can go get Lexi if…”

“No! No, just stay with me for now.”

“You sure? If you’re in pain, doc could get you more painkillers…”

“Then I’d fall asleep again, and wake up as confused as I was a moment ago.”

“Sorry…. I’d meant to stay up til you woke. Guess I fell asleep, huh?

“Long day, miss Nyx?”

“Long day, miss Ryder. Long day indeed.”


End file.
